The Governor as public intellectual

In states with a history of display of intellect by their leadership, there is the tendency to dismiss the current leadership of Oyo State’s new-found romance with display of the cerebrum as a non-issue. In Oyo, renowned for its acronym as a Pacesetter but which had, over the years, lost both the pace and the setting potentials, as intangible as it may sound that its governor arrests national and international audiences with impeccable intellectual delivery, this is a major celebration for the people of Oyo State.

In the recent past, Oyo State suffered terribly in the estimation of the world as one administered by a leadership that was everything but deep. Every anti-intellectual story that filtered from the state to the world then stuck as emerging from a familiar terrain. When miscreants of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, (NURTW) reported to have permanent chalets inside the Government House, had their villainy and spillage of blood abetted by the state, this cohered with the perception of Oyo State as a state run by everything but intellectual leadership.

But Oyo had not always been like that. For a state once run by geniuses like Bola Ige and Omololu Olunloyo to have relapsed that irretrievably became a song on the lips of dirge-crooners. Many analysts bemoaned the fate of Oyo, once administered by Ige, poet and literary icon and Olunloyo, mathematical genius and wizard of polemics, falling into the hands of such a vacant-minded leadership.

Doubtless, this nostalgia to reconnect with a deep-minded past recommended the election of Abiola Ajimobi at the April, 2011 polls. Engaging polemicist and a man who can answer to a description of French author, Voltaire as one unusual brain homed in a human skull, his rich credentials as Managing Director of a multinational oil corporation persuaded the electorate that his could not be a replay of the vacuity of Oyo’s recent past.

Having set on an even keel the construction of 199 roads, about 20 fallen bridges in the state, mobile health to the nooks and crannies of the state, treating almost half a million people in the process, Ajimobi, On September 20, 2011 set the ball rolling. His unspoken intention, no doubt, was to rebrand Oyo State as the intellectual capital of South West Nigeria that it had always been. Sitting on the same seat where Obafemi Awolowo sat to proffer those intellectual responses to the post-colony of Nigeria, it would be uncharitable of Ajimobi not to rekindle the flame of an intellectual incubator which Oyo had always been.

So to Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State, Ajimobi moored the intellectual boat. The hall was filled to the brim. Could anything good come out of Nazareth, the audience seemed to be asking. From an Oyo State said to be possessed of a leadership that valued necklace and bleaching cream? Decked in the academic hood and gown of a Guest Lecturer, the Oyo Governor went on an academic journey that struck his audience as unique and scintillating. Speaking to the topic, Challenge of Progress In The Midst Of Plenty, Ajimobi pleasantly shocked the institution’s Vice Chancellor, himself a foremost scholar on federalism, Eghosa Osaghae, who listened as the governor cited his journal articles of yore with astonishing rapidity.

Then Ajimobi went into the nitty-gritty of the topic, dissecting it as a cheetah would an impala. He dissected the concept of crisis, submitting that it is at the core of the Nigerian nation and that it is impossible to take a shuttle into the Nigerian past without giving an ample space to its conflictual background. Indeed, while summarizing the Nigerian situation, Ajimobi said that the country’s post-independence situation was a long drawn-out decay or decline, whose empirical features are political instability, a low level of national cohesion and economic crisis, stating that all these indices, as far as Nigeria was concerned, are mutually reinforcing.

He went into the post-independence Nigerian situation, especially during the First Republic where crises among the political class tore the republic apart. Thereafter, he went comparative on African experience of crises and expatiating on the interwoven nature of crises in Africa. “What makes conflict or a conflicting situation at the core of today’s globalized world’s concern” he began, “is its tendency to leave its border, making an internal conflict to burst out of its seams, and refusing to be confined within the borders of a single country… A good example of this could be found in the recent conflict situation that sprung up in Liberia in the 1990s. This Liberian crisis sowed the seeds of conflicts that eventually spread to countries like Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire and Guinea.” The audience was enthused.

And he drew the crises situation home, to the Oyo State example. At this stage, the university audience could not hide its delight at the depth of his analysis. Encouraged by the enraptured silence of the audience, Ajimobi went on: “You will recall the periodic violent skirmishes that our state was renowned for under this regime. Blood was shed at will as if in appeasement of some blood-sucking deities. Politicians became indistinguishable from thugs and motor-park kingpins. Inside this vortex was the state government which was said to be in cahoots with the motor-park kingpins. The very sad episode of the death of a notorious NURTW kingpin, who, with the support of the state godfather, took over our State Assembly in 2006, is still very fresh in our memory. .. Indeed, an NURTW thug moved the motion for the impeachment of the then state governor, hitting the gavel on the table in a manner reminiscent of how it is done in a sane legislative House. And rather than pronouncing the governor, who was the target of his patrons, he “the Speaker is hereby impeached”. The rest, as they say, is history.”

By the time the governor finished delivering the lecture, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

No doubt due to the news of his intellectual intervention, Ajimobi was again invited to deliver a keynote address at the Town Hall meeting held at the Dusable Museum of the African-American history, Chicago, United States. “The Need for True Federalism in Nigeria: The Oyo State Example” was the topic he had to do justice to.

Ajimobi first went into the history of the contiguous territories of Nigeria’s 350 ethnic groups and the constitutional history of Nigeria, from Clifford, Macpherson to the current effort at constitutional amendments. He itemized the four phases of the attempt at federalism in Nigeria which he named to be, one, under colonial rule when Nigerian nationalists struggled for the enthronement of a federal system as an integral part of the political independence agenda; the post-independence era when the political class debated the political architecture bequeathed by the departing colonial power; the third being under military rule when Nigerians rose against elements of military unitary system that ran contrary to their federalist expectations and final phase which began immediately the present democratic dispensation started in 1999.

The governor then went into the anti-federal nature of the Nigerian federal practice. “Extant laws that are anti-federal include the Land Use Act; the Laws on Petroleum and Gas that give these resources to the federal government; the Federal Inland Revenue Act of 2007 which empowers the Federal Inland Revenue Service to collect revenue for the three tiers of government, the Monitoring of Revenue Allocation to Local Government Act of 2005, which compels states to set up joint local government account committees and empowers the federal government to deduct from funds allocated to States money they failed to pay to local governments in the previous year.”

He also went experiential in his governance of Oyo State. “From my experience as a Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria between 2003 – 2007 and governor of Oyo State since last year, I make bold to say that there are too many responsibilities and resources at the federal level to allow for efficiency. The federal government has become so big that it is theoretically and practically impossible to guarantee efficiency… There is no way, given the capacity of the bureaucracy at the federal level, that efficiency can be guaranteed in the deployment of resources in this circumstance.”

By the time he ended the address, he had succeeded in drawing the attention of the foreign audience to the wonky federal practice in Nigeria, especially through his conclusion that, “For me, the federal government should be limited to setting policies – after consultations with the states – on areas like road, agriculture, sports, etc. while the states are granted the powers and resources to manage these responsibilities that affect the lives of our people at the grassroots.”

It was apparent now that Ajimobi’s renown as a public intellectual had reached a crescendo. This must have informed the London Chamber of Commerce and Industries’ (LCCI) invitation to him to address it on the business potentials in Oyo State. Held at the…., the governor, speaking through a power-point presentation, took his audience on a shuttle into the historical greatness of his state, the stasis it relapsed into and the promise it holds for investors. As usual, at the end of the presentation, the audience, which comprised white investors and friends of Nigeria, gave him a resounding applause for his mastery of the turf and his exhibition of high mental acuity.

Two days after, Ajimobi was at the prestigious Chatham House. Asked to discuss, extempore, the topic, “Review and Reform: Key Elements and Implications of Nigeria’s Constitution Review Process,’’ again, he received a standing ovation of his deep understanding of the issues under reference. By the time, the second day, the governor arrived at the University of Oxford to talk on “Federalism and the Imperatives of Political Restructuring for the Development of Nigeria,” the audience had been convinced that in its midst was an emerging public intellectual who, at lecture podia, theoretically dissects knotty issues, while at home, in his Oyo State enclave, he brings solutions to a people who still have nostalgia for a state that was a complete package of a performer and one they could be proud of his élan.

Adedayo is Special Adviser (Media) to Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State.